Shannon Stunden Bower

watersheds: conceptualizing
MANITOBA'S
DRAINED LANDSCAPE, 1895–1950

ABSTRACT

This article considers land drainage in the wet prairie region of Manitoba, Canada, from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. It explains why watershed-based drainage funding, proposed in the early 1920s as a means of financing the more substantial ditching necessary to address the province's drainage problems, was embraced by some Manitobans, resisted by others, and repeatedly rejected by provincial administrators. Federal government settlement policy, on one hand, and communities of interest derived from the local topography of southern Manitoba, on the other, defined the terms of the debate over watershed-based funding. While scientific uncertainty and political change were contributing factors, it was in large part to mitigate conflict between highlanders and lowlanders that the province ultimately assumed a larger role in funding drainage. The history of drainage in Manitoba's wet prairie, while broadening understanding of the challenges of mobile nature amid grid-based agricultural settlement, also illustrates the importance of considering the specific environmental conditions for resettlement and the workings of provincial and municipal governments. At such local scales, the intertwined character of the human and physical landscapes is particularly apparent.

THE SURVEY GRID AND THE NATURE OF THE COUNTRY

SOON AFTER THE CREATION of the Province of Manitoba, Canada, in 1870, the head of the new provincial government instructed Legislative Clerk Molyneux St. John to study local factors that might affect agricultural settlement. St. John's report, submitted to Lieutenant Governor Adams Archibald a few months later, emphasized "the number of muskegs or swamps which are found in several parts of the Province." While valuable as sources of hay and water, these wet areas could interfere with cropping. "It is therefore not unreasonable to assume," St. John concluded, that the "land which a settler should be entitled to take up must in some measure depend on the nature of the country." In his view, the shape and size of the parcels of land made available to settlers should reflect their environmental characteristics.¹

St. John's report was an important recognition of the need to accommodate water patterns in the wet prairie. The term "wet prairie" was used by nineteenth-century newcomers to describe parts of the north-central United States that were, as later observers would determine, ecologically similar to much of southern Manitoba.² It reflects a key difference within the prairie region, underlining the environmental contrast between the drier west and the wetter east.³ There is a parallel historiographical distinction to be made: While aridity has attracted some attention from historians, the problem of excess surface water has been less studied.⁴ The phrase "wet prairie" also conveys how some aspects of the eastern prairie environment remained unchanged even as the tall grass prairie was plowed for fields of cultivated grain. Big bluestem and other grasses characteristic of the tall grass prairie may now be hard to find in many places, but what were perceived as surface water problems continue to bedevil Manitoba farmers.

St. John did not succeed in influencing settlement policy. In the Canadian variant on what historian John Opie has seen as the American government's promotion of privatization, a settlement grid was laid atop the Canadian West, including the wetter areas of southern Manitoba.⁵ The grid was used as the framework for land disposition, opening up to newcomers quarter sections of 160 acres (65 hectares) under the federal government's 1872 Dominion Lands Act. Settlers would complete their entries by fulfilling certain homestead duties, such as clearing land and erecting buildings. The provisions for settling the West were similar in Canada and the United States.⁶ Both nations exhibit the resulting checkerboard geography, in many areas still dramatically evident from above.⁷ The process of settlement also influenced newcomers' mental maps. It gave local significance to the ideas of private property and land improvement that were part of the cultural baggage of many settlers.⁸ But it did not account for what St. John termed "the nature of the country"—what we might call the watershed patterns that were so important in southern Manitoba.

This essay describes how persistent surface water problems prompted some Manitobans to advocate the adoption of watershed-based drainage funding, even while others condemned this as nothing short of a betrayal of the basic legislative and ideological principles governing land holding on the Canadian prairies. The key factor distinguishing the two perspectives was farm elevation, with the low and wet angling for assistance and the high and dry refusing to contribute. The conflict between groups was both heated and sustained. Partly in an effort at mitigation, the provincial government assumed a larger role in drainage financing, eventually undertaking to attempt to sever connections between the upper and lower watershed by funding the construction of enormous drains. Molyneux St. John's early assertion that the settlement pattern should depend on environmental conditions, prescient as it might have seemed to those vulnerable to flooding, was ultimately disregarded. Even more strikingly, the provincial government, in seeking to reshape the environment to accommodate the settlement pattern, undertook a project that amounted to the opposite of what St. John had recommended.

THE SOUP BOWL AND THE FLOODING PROBLEM

EUROPEAN RESETTLEMENT of the Canadian prairies intensified in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the settlement boom across the region was accompanied by a drainage boom in the province of Manitoba.⁹ The moderate drainage efforts of the 1870s and 1880s were dwarfed by the more substantial projects undertaken after passage of the Land Drainage Act in 1895. This provincial legislation provided for the creation of drainage districts, administrative entities characteristic of large-scale, government-assisted land drainage projects across North America.¹⁰ Defined geographically by perceived flooding problems, drainage districts made possible a more direct relation between those who benefited from drainage and those who paid for it, through creation of a taxable entity that approximated the flooded area. Through the sale of debentures on behalf of districts, the provincial government would front the money for large-scale drainage, with drainage district residents repaying the loan through an annual levy over a period of decades. The expectation was that the improved agricultural productivity of drained land would more than compensate for the expense of construction. Drainage districts were a targeted solution for the flood problem, aimed at those areas in which surface water problems interfered with the private property landscape of the Dominion Land Survey.

Drainage in Manitoba depended largely on the construction of surface ditches. Compared to the challenges of conveying water vast distances for irrigation (as in the irrigation districts of the drier west) or the cost of installing underground tile drains (as in portions of the American wet prairie), the logistics of draining the province were relatively simple. Generally, government surveyors or engineers laid out the drains and the government contracted with private firms to construct them, under the inspection and supervision of provincial agents. The primary contractor often entered into arrangements with a number of subcontractors. While a considerable amount of work was done by horse and plow, ditch-digging machines were also employed. In Drainage District no. 1, for instance, two dredges were built on location. They started digging at the high end of one of the proposed major drains and floated downstream in their own ditch as they worked toward the outlet.¹¹ These imposing machines leant a sense of grandeur to the enterprise, confirming the association between drainage and progress. Districts were numbered in order of creation and identified by number. Eventually, a total of twenty-four districts covering more than 2 million acres (809,375 hectares) were scattered across a significant portion of the more densely settled region of the province, from the eastern shore of Lake Winnipeg to near the Saskatchewan border and from the American border to more than halfway up the northern basin of Lake Manitoba.¹²

Map 1. Manitoba Drainage Districts, 1933

Adapted by Eric Leinberger from AM, Manitoba Department of Mines and Natural Resources, Surveys Branch, Map of Manitoba, Southern Portion, 1933; Map: The Drainage Districts in J. H. Ellis, The Soils of Manitoba (Winnipeg: Economic Survey Board, 1939), 29.
Because it was dissolved after only a few years, Drainage District no. 21 does not appear on this map.

Despite the large area over which they were scattered, drainage districts shared a similar geographical character. The topography of southern Manitoba has been compared to a vast soup bowl, with the comparatively flat basin of the Red River lowlands bounded on the east by the irregular topography of the Precambrian Shield and on the west by the dramatic increase in elevation along the Manitoba Escarpment.¹³ The drainage districts of the province were situated in the bottom of this soup bowl, many at or slightly above about 220 meters (722 feet) above sea level. To both the east and the west the land rose to more than 300 meters (984 feet).¹⁴ In 1950, provincial government investigator R. H. Clark described what this meant for drainage: "The tributaries which originate in the rolling hills to the west and the high flat marsh plains to the east have steep slopes of entrance to the valley. Upon reaching the ancient lake bed [the bed of glacial Lake Agassiz, now commonly known as the Red River lowlands] these slopes quickly flatten out and, since the channel through the plain has not sufficient capacity to carry the flows, the water quickly tops the banks and spreads out over the valley."¹⁵ In the evocative language employed by early drainers, watercourses would "lose themselves" as they passed from the sides to the bottom of the soup bowl. Water would spread out across extensive areas of land. While much of it eventually found its way to the lowland waterways, some of it pooled in slight depressions and disappeared only through evaporation.¹⁶ Some areas of the province were affected by this problem more severely than others (such as those northerly districts situated especially close to the 984 foot [300 meter] contour line, though lower population density in these areas likely meant that fewer farms were flooded than in more densely populated southern areas).¹⁷ Some districts also confronted additional localized challenges to drainage (such as the underground springs that fed the wetland that became Drainage District no. 1). Nevertheless, the problem of water pooling in the bottom of the bowl was common to many areas of southern Manitoba.¹⁸ In the view of one international expert on land drainage, the problem was "peculiar to this region," at least in its severity.¹⁹

Manitoba's soup-bowl topography was not taken into account in the creation of drainage districts. The logic behind district formation in Manitoba may be usefully contrasted to the sort of thinking that defined water administration under the 1894 Northwest Irrigation Act, federal legislation for the drier areas of the Canadian prairies. Building on American and Australian experiences, Canada cancelled riparian rights and established a permit system of water allocation prior to extensive settlement.²⁰ In what became the provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan in 1905, water was administered in relation to conditions throughout a drainage basin. As resolving the problem of scarcity required looking around for outside sources, arid regions leant themselves to a spatially expansive conception of water management. The Northwest Irrigation Act prevented prospective owners from viewing the environment mainly through the lens of the Dominion Lands Act, because they were obliged to think not only of how to get land but also of how to get water. In contrast, the problem of excess in agricultural Manitoba (where the Northwest Irrigation Act did not apply) could be considered in a spatially restricted manner, in relation to the lands immediately affected. This narrow focus did not situate the problem of flooding within the larger watershed. It was comparable to irrigators trying to solve aridity without importing water from wetter regions. Work within drainage districts can thus be seen as the construction of a watershed substitute: Modifications within limited areas afflicted by flooding were to solve a problem derived in large part from the geography of the watershed.²¹

Many who sought to establish farms in Manitoba's wet prairie shared the hardships of agricultural flooding with their immediate neighbors and with others within their local community. Mutual sympathy laid the groundwork for cooperation on attempts to solve the flood problem. Effective artificial drainage depended on a coordinated infrastructure that extended across private homesteads, with logical gradation among channel sizes and secure outlets in substantial natural waterways. If these were not achieved, drainage projects could serve to worsen existing surface water problems, or even to create new ones. The need for carefully designed drainage generated demand for government involvement, as institutionalized administration offered ways of coordinating the work and managing the finances. At the provincial level, the Department of Public Works was expanded to meet the demand; at the municipal level, formation of some local municipal governments related to local desire to undertake additional drainage.²² The Land Drainage Act furthered the work of drainage by facilitating projects that spanned municipal boundaries.

Insofar as some municipalities varied significantly in ethnic composition, some drainage districts overlay cultural divisions as well as local political boundaries. For instance, Drainage District no. 12 included the predominantly Mennonite municipality of Rhineland, the largely French municipality of Montcalm, and the substantially European municipality of Morris.²³ Rhineland had grown out of the Mennonite West Reserve, an area in which the Canadian government, keen to encourage immigration by groups unwilling to work within the settlement grid of the Dominion Lands Act, accepted landholding arrangements that deviated from the prairie standard. Many of Rhineland's Mennonites were leery of integration into the wider Manitoba community, but their distinctive lifeways remained viable only if their farms were relatively productive. As flooding was a real threat to agricultural prosperity and the need for a coordinated system of ditches made small-scale solutions unlikely, cooperation with other Manitobans on drainage projects was necessary.²⁴ As historical geographer John Warkentin has made clear, the drains, which were "of great importance in the settlement geography" of the Mennonite Reserve were also "part of the larger works carried out in the Red River Lowland."²⁵ While federal government regulations allowed for the preservation of Mennonite distinctiveness by authorizing a different style of land use, the provincial government's drainage legislation facilitated necessary cross-cultural cooperation on shared drainage problems. As a response to the perceived problem of agricultural flooding, drainage served to unite Manitobans through the shared experience of involvement in a large-scale, long-term infrastructural project. Insofar as drainage depended on the intervention and assistance of the provincial government, Manitobans of various backgrounds also came to share a parallel orientation toward the provincial state. The perceived environmental problem and its infrastructural solutions bore heavily on those who sought to farm the wet prairie, modifying human as well as physical geography.²⁶

If the ecological commons of surface water bore on Manitoba's human geography, the province's soup bowl topography gave the new geography a particular legitimacy and significance. With drainage districts defined largely in relation to the spatial extent of flooding, rather than with reference to the larger watershed in which the flooded lands were embedded, the water that ran in from higher lands became known as foreign water. The distinction between foreign and local water was central to conflict over drainage in Manitoba. Rather than a proliferation of limited upstream/downstream conflicts among individuals, relatively coherent topographically defined communities of interest emerged. Remarkably, in this relatively flat prairie province, the terms highlanders and lowlanders became part of the local discourse, reflecting important conflicts of interest between those who lived at different elevations.²⁷ In Drainage District no. 12, everyone was a lowlander, regardless of whether they were residents of the municipality of Montcalm, Morris, or Rhineland and regardless of whether they were British, French, or Mennonite.

While a mutual sympathy united drained areas, even those that were not directly connected by ditches, it was in contrast to the experiences of those who lived higher up that the lowlander perspective took on real coherence. The consolidation of the lowlander viewpoint is clearly illustrated with reference to Drainage District no. 2, which was by far the largest of the districts at nearly 500,000 acres (202,343 hectares). The region had a particularly severe problem with foreign water. Annual snowmelt flooding that overwhelmed lowland streams, flash floods caused by intense precipitation, and the sediment that clogged waterways and ditches: All clearly descended from the highlands to the west.²⁸ There was no disputing these basic facts of physical geography. But it seems most lowlanders believed that their lands should absorb what was understood as the natural flow from the highlands.²⁹ The district was incorporated in 1898, and the initial phase of construction lasted through 1907. A series of main and feeder drains was designed to fundamentally reshape flow patterns in the region, with ditches constructed in number and capacity to deal with the existing problem. The massive effort required to remake the wet prairie geography was buoyed throughout by the optimism of residents and experts. Focused on solving the foreign water problem as they understood it, few anticipated that the problem itself might worsen and render their solutions inadequate.

But even as drain construction went ahead in the lowlands, rapid environmental change also took place beyond Drainage District no. 2. The 500,000 acres of District no. 2 accounted for well under half of a watershed of more than 1.2 million acres (485,623 hectares).³⁰ Settlement, clearing, and plowing had increased in areas beyond the reach of the new ditches, but within the tributary watershed. While flooding was moderated for a few years by dry conditions, 1912 brought severe inundation. This prompted another period of intense construction, which concluded around 1915. By this point, frustrated with continued surface water problems, lowlanders were beginning to look beyond the drainage district to explain flooding. They concluded that ongoing cultivation and deforestation in the higher lands were affecting water patterns in ways detrimental to the lowlands. In their view, the flow regime had been changed. Agricultural progress in the highlands was contributing to flood disasters down below. In 1918, the Red River Valley Drainage and Improvement Association formed. Made up largely of representatives of the municipalities in Drainage District no. 2, the aim was to lobby the government more effectively.³¹ The government of Manitoba was receptive to the association's concerns and connected them to expressions of discontent received from individuals in the area and in other drainage districts. It was clear that something had to be done. Drainage in southern Manitoba was at a watershed.

THE SULLIVAN COMMISSION AND THE WATERSHED

THE PROVINCIAL GOVERNMENT was eager to respond to lowlander discontent, but was not clear on how to proceed. Officials sought the advice of Charles Gleason Elliot, a prominent American drainage engineer. Elliot served as chief of drainage investigations for the United States Department of Agriculture and published numerous works on drainage.³² His Engineering for Land Drainage: A Manual for the Reclamation of Lands Injured by Water (Wiley & Sons) was in its third printing by 1919. In 1918, the Manitoba Department of Public Works asked Elliot to examine the Manitoba drainage system and recommend what type of inquiry should be carried out, as well as to offer preliminary suggestions on possible solutions.

Elliot's report, submitted to the Minister of Public Works in June 1918, was generally positive in its assessment. Well acquainted with the challenges of drainage, he appreciated the government's efforts to grapple with a difficult situation. Early efforts seemed well intentioned and at least moderately successful, given the severity of Manitoba's drainage problem. The province was keeping pace with other regions of the Commonwealth, many of which were in the process of "revising and perfecting their drainage systems and doing it at large expense." On balance, while recommending some adjustments, his report praised the Land Drainage Act.³³

Though he tried not to anticipate the results of the full investigation, the changes Elliot envisioned were significant. In a manner typical of the careful tone of his report, he noted the challenge of locating appropriate drainage district boundaries, especially "where natural drainage lines do not point out clearly the divisions between the watersheds." Regardless of the difficulties, he suggested the province expand districts to reflect the "conditions which Nature has imposed." Districts that more closely approximated the watershed would be better positioned to manage water flow. Having identified the heart of the drainage problem, Elliot pointed out possible pitfalls in trying to solve it. From a discussion of the importance of watershed management, he moved directly to the matter of public opinion. He recommended that any government investigation should keep in close touch with the affected settlers, as "the cordial cooperation of all parties concerned is highly desirable, and even necessary, if the best results are to be obtained."³⁴

Following Elliot's recommendation, a drainage commission was appointed in January 1919.³⁵ J. G. Sullivan, a civil engineer with considerable experience in railroads, was appointed chair. H. Grills, a farmer, and J. A. Thompson, an entrepreneur, rounded out the commission. The commissioners spent two years examining drainage matters by studying local geography, researching drainage practices elsewhere, and consulting with experts and settlers. In their report of December 1921, they concluded that "the greatest factor causing damage from flooding is the changed conditions since the districts were first formed."³⁶ They found that the change was particularly marked in relation to Drainage District no. 2. In seven townships just beyond the western boundary of the District, there were 4,177 acres (1,690 hectares) of improved land in 1877. Some thirteen years later, the amount under cultivation had almost doubled. In 1915, 82,000 acres (33,184 hectares) were under the plow. By the early 1920s, nearly all of the land in the area had been cleared of timber and planted to crop. In lands farther west but still within the watershed, commissioners estimated the rate of cultivation at 75 percent. The report argued that such changes worsened flooding in the drainage district, "no matter how well the original channels were designed, and no matter how well they were maintained, they would not now be capable of properly taking off the extra rush of waters that comes from the higher grounds on account of the changed conditions."³⁷

Confronted with the inadequacy of the drainage district as a watershed substitute, the Sullivan Commission proposed a solution for all the drainage districts of the province: The boundaries of the drainage district should be enlarged to encompass "all lands whose surplus waters drain into said district and are carried by an artificial channel through it to a natural outlet."³⁸ Once included within a watershed-based drainage district, highlanders could be assessed for the cost of improvements to lowland drainage that were necessary to cope with the increased flow derived from highland land use changes. While recommending adjustments remarkably similar to those suggested by C. G. Elliot, the commissioners disregarded the American expert's advice about the importance of public relations, perhaps assuming that their authority as experts would be sufficient to carry the day.³⁹ Indeed, the optimistic J. G. Sullivan was convinced that adoption of watershed management would actually ease conflict. As he explained in the conclusion to his report, any other arrangement would inevitably lead to disputes.⁴⁰

Subsequent events would demonstrate that the watershed approach was no safeguard against disputes. Following return of the Sullivan report, the Manitoba Legislature's Committee on Drainage convened a series of public hearings during the winter of 1921–1922. The surviving partial transcripts of the proceedings provide a vivid picture of how the watershed idea was received.⁴¹ Not surprisingly, opinion often broke along topographical lines. Many speakers from municipalities that overlapped substantially with one or more drainage districts were sympathetic to the idea of watershed management. While they had been willing to take responsibility for the expense of draining what they took for the natural flow from the highlands, they felt it was unfair to expect lowlanders to pay for the more substantial drainage infrastructure necessary to manage increased runoff rates. The private property ideal contained within the Dominion Lands Act, which held that individuals were responsible for improvements to their own lands, should be moderated in the Manitoba soup bowl, because of how progress for some amounted to disaster for others. In the view of a representative from Roland, the eastern half of which was included in Drainage District no. 2, "there seemed to be no other logical boundary for [drainage financing] except the watershed."⁴²

Not everyone was so sure. Some Manitobans who objected pointed out the lack of consensus on cause and effect relations within watersheds. This mirrored disputes underway elsewhere. In the United States, the forest stream-flow controversy, a debate over flood control strategies that raged with particular fervor from the Progressive period through the New Deal era, turned in part on whether and to what extent deforestation altered run-off patterns. Could floods be mitigated adequately through changed land management and small dams or was it necessary to construct massive water control structures? Federal agencies offered conflicting opinions about how action in the upper watershed affected conditions down below. The Department of Agriculture advocated careful land management as an effective flood mitigation strategy, while the Army Corps of Engineers argued that only dam construction offered real security. In the context of uncertainty over the link between action in one part of the watershed and effect in another, each agency lobbied for a conception of the flood problem that corresponded to the solution it offered.⁴³

While the dispute in the wet prairie was as much about agricultural cultivation as deforestation, in both cases uncertainty about downstream consequences was conducive to intense conflict.⁴⁴ Government agencies battled things out in the United States; in Manitoba, debate raged among topographically defined communities of interest. Highlanders contested the relation between action in one region and effect in another that underpinned the idea of watershed management. Reeve D. F. Stewart of Thompson Municipality, situated directly to the west of Roland, argued that the Sullivan report was "entirely wrong" in asserting that extensive cultivation had led to hastened and increased runoff. He was blunt: "any farmer who knows anything about farming knows that cultivated land will not run off water faster than wild land."⁴⁵ In light of uncertainty over cause-and-effect relations within watersheds, objections such as Stewart's could not be dismissed entirely, despite obviously self-interested motivations.

Highlanders were not mollified by Sullivan's assertions that they would be liable only if improvements to highland areas had altered surface water flow and that their assessments would in any case be comparatively moderate. To say that highlanders rejected the idea of apportioning drainage costs on a watershed basis does not adequately convey the fury of their responses. They found it "incredible that any legislative body should attempt to put across such a despotic and arbitrary matter as this." The report of the Sullivan Commission seemed a "diabolical plot," and those opposed vowed to fight against it "until the last ditch."⁴⁶

Why such strident language? For highlanders, the recommendations of the Sullivan Commission were a fundamental betrayal of the terms under which they had taken up land in the province. This was a more important issue than the accuracy of the science Sullivan invoked in support of his recommendations. Highlanders felt they were being told they had contributed to lowland flooding not by wrongdoing such as irresponsible drainage but by the apparent good work of clearing and cultivating. Under the Dominion Lands Act, homesteaders were required to make improvements in order to secure title to their lands. Those who purchased land did the same to capitalize on their investment. Highlanders who cleared land had been doing just as they had been encouraged—even obliged—by government. But the Sullivan Commission now asserted that by improving their land, highlanders had rendered themselves liable for damage to the lowlands. How could this be?⁴⁷

Map 2. Selected Municipalities and Southern Drainage Districts of Manitoba, 1933

Adapted by Eric Leinberger from AM, Manitoba Department of Mines and Natural Resources, Surveys Branch, Map of Manitoba, Southern Portion, 1933; Map: The Drainage Districts in J. H. Ellis, The Soils of Manitoba (Winnipeg: Economic Survey Board, 1939), 29.

Beyond the question whether the good work of land improvement could have negative consequences—even financial liability—there was the issue of whether settlers had any responsibility for quarter-sections other than their own. Much highlander testimony before the Legislative Committee on Drainage consisted of settlement experiences on quarter-sections with challenges every bit as daunting as the flooding that affected lowlanders. The complexity and diversity of highland settler experiences was reduced to one substantive point: As they had received no assistance with the hard tasks they faced on arrival, why should they assist with drainage? One highlander explained how, on arriving in the region, he paid $4,500 for a highland quarter-section that had already been cleared of timber. His brother paid $1,700 for undrained lowland that was subject to flooding.⁴⁸ In his mind, the difference in their initial outlay represented the price of improvement, whether what was needed was clearing or drainage. Having paid the higher price, he was unwilling to subsidize his brother. Not even familial relationships moderated the conviction that individuals should fund only improvements to their own homesteads. The situation was exacerbated as lowland farms were generally more productive than those in the highlands.⁴⁹ Highlanders particularly resented the prospect of having to contribute to the reclamation of "land which is worth much more than ours," in the words of a representative from Thompson Municipality.⁵⁰ Some who testified before the legislative committee acknowledged a parallel between drainage and road-building, with the latter understood as a necessary investment of public funds in support of private agricultural enterprise.⁵¹ But few highlanders saw the parallel as any reason to moderate their views on drainage. Self-interest no doubt played a role in ensuring that most remained convinced of the legitimate distinction between the roads they felt benefited Manitobans at large and the drains they felt benefited only lowlanders.

Highlander protests before the Legislative Committee on Drainage were heated, and the key referents were the fundamental legislative and ideological pillars that underpinned the settlement of the Canadian prairies. The Dominion Lands Act linked private property and agricultural progress, as settlers were required to cultivate their homesteads in order to secure title. In southern Manitoba's soup bowl, progress for some meant disaster for others. Watershed management seemed to lowlanders a solution, but to highlanders, a betrayal. The watershed concept would have redefined property and progress by establishing a relation between the upper and lower watershed. As highlanders could potentially have been obliged to contribute to the cost of lowland drainage, they would have been involved in the improvement of lands they did not own. Not surprisingly, they objected. The watershed idea did not accommodate the human history of the landscape—the notion of private property legitimized by agricultural improvement that remained, at least for highland settlers, entirely naturalized.

While all agreed that those who benefited from drainage should pay for it, it was clear that determining who was implicated in drainage was not an easy task. Ultimately, the problem was that all parties were looking for hard and fast answers to what was in reality a question of values.⁵² Would Manitoba be a place where private property prevailed absolutely, with farmers free to disregard how their actions affected others? Or would it be a place where land use would be coordinated across individuals' holdings, with highlanders compensating for how their actions might negatively affect lowlanders? Manitobans were debating whether, as Legislative Clerk Molyneux St. John recommended in his early report to Lieutenant Governor Archibald, landholding should be contingent on local environmental conditions. And at stake was the human as much as the physical landscape of the province.

By the time of the legislative hearings on the Sullivan report, there was a significant movement in Manitoba to rationalize how the province was governed. John Bracken, who was appointed premier in 1922 and would remain in power for over two decades, advocated what he saw as efficient, businesslike administration.⁵³ The scientific uncertainty that came out before the legislative hearings on drainage may well have diminished the influence of Sullivan's recommendation for watershed management. Further, Bracken's strongest supporters were those of British origin, who made up a larger constituency in the highland than the lowland municipalities.⁵⁴ But in seeking to understand why the provincial government decided in the mid-1920s not to resize drainage districts to reflect the watersheds of the province, it would be an error to overlook the magnitude of the change recommended by Sullivan, and the intensity of the conflict between topographically defined communities of interest that was sparked by the idea of watershed-based drainage financing. The outrage expressed by highlanders reflected how environmentally attuned management conflicted with the basic terms of agricultural settlement in the province. It was clear that the province's drainage problems would not be easily solved, but neither would the human landscape of progress and property be easily displaced.

THE WATERSHED AND THE DRAINAGE DISTRICT

WITH THE MODERATE PRECIPITATION of the 1920s, the modest policy changes enacted in the wake of the Sullivan Report allowed the drainage matter to recede from view for the better part of a decade. But the 1930s brought things to a head once more. The use of surface ditches rather than underground tile drains substantially reduced capital costs in Manitoba, but resulted in an infrastructure vulnerable to erosion and sedimentation, which could impede the capacity of drains to transport water quickly and effectively.⁵⁵ Across the West, drought-stricken farmers watched as dry winds stripped fertile topsoil from their fields. Some of this windblown material ended up in Manitoba's drains.⁵⁶ Particularly in light of confusion over responsibility for ditch maintenance, soil would often remain in place long enough to become anchored by plant growth. Drains were further degraded by farmers' efforts to adapt to dry periods an infrastructure that was tailored to wet years. Despite frequent surface water flooding, groundwater resources were inadequate throughout much of the clay-soiled Red River valley.⁵⁷ In times of drought, some farmers deliberately obstructed drains, as erecting a small dam was an easy way to create a convenient source of water for specialty crops or livestock. Even if dams were removed during periods of high water, pooling behind obstructions would have already induced deposition of sediment that would have remained suspended in flowing water. Dry years contributed to infrastructure degradation that had catastrophic potential when wet years returned.

Even more troubling than the accelerated infrastructure degradation of the 1930s was the crisis in municipal finance. Drainage districts lacked their own administrative infrastructure for collection of the drainage levy. They relied on municipalities to bill ratepayers and forward the money to the province. But in the difficult years of the 1930s, many district residents could not pay their bills. In turn, municipalities had trouble meeting their commitments to the province. Between 1928 and 1935, the provincial government was obliged to allow sixteen municipalities to postpone drainage payments. In April 1935, the total amount owed to the province was nearly $4 million. This was a substantial debt on an infrastructure valued at approximately $7 million, and it was more than enough to threaten the solvency of some municipalities.⁵⁸

The government addressed the situation by passing the Land Drainage Arrangement Act, which provided for a royal commission to investigate drainage financing. Chaired by Professor John N. Finlayson of the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Manitoba, the commission also included John Holland, reeve of the Municipality of Springfield, and John Spalding, secretary of the Union of Manitoba Municipalities.⁵⁹ After a year of investigations, the commission reported in March 1936. It recommended that the Province assume about 45 percent of the accumulated debt of the drainage districts.⁶⁰ This was a notable departure from early thinking on drainage, in which district residents were to bear the entire financial burden. It was also significantly different from Sullivan's report, which had proposed that all residents of a watershed should at least potentially be liable for the costs of draining lowland areas. Finlayson argued that while highlanders should not be made liable for the drainage levy by being included against their will in watershed-based drainage districts, neither should lowlanders be obliged to bear the entire financial burden. A more substantial flow of cash from the province was, in Finlayson's view, the best way to establish drainage districts on a firmer footing and help to reduce conflict over flows of water from highlands to lowlands.

The Manitoba government implemented some recommendations of the Finlayson Royal Commission. Drainage districts were renamed drainage maintenance districts, reflecting a reorientation from system expansion to improvement. This shift in emphasis was fundamental to Finlayson's vision, as he anticipated that maintenance would be far less costly than new construction. The sort of work likely to be required in the future would thus be more in line with the available resources. However, the amount of money the government made available for drainage was substantially less than even the relatively modest amount the commission recommended. Instead of paying between a third and half the cost of annual maintenance, the province capped its total contribution to all districts at $30,000. Although this was later raised to $40,000, any cap meant that drainage maintenance districts (or more to the point, the lowlanders who lived within them) were liable for heavy costs incurred during wet seasons.⁶¹ Partly for this reason, the onset of a wetter period in the early 1940s was the catalyst to yet another government investigation.

In January 1947, civil engineer M. A. Lyons, recently retired from a long career with the Department of Public Works, was asked to conduct this further inquiry.⁶² At his request, the Order-in-Council by which he was appointed mandated him to address not only the specific question of drainage, but also how surface water problems related to environmental management more broadly conceived. Having spent years administering Manitoba's flawed drainage system, Lyons embraced the opportunity to consider whether a significant conceptual shift would improve the situation.⁶³ At the launch of this third investigation, it would have been reasonable to anticipate that Lyons's expansive approach would result in a recommendation for something like watershed-based management. But over the course of his investigation, he changed his mind. In his 1950 report, he argued that the watershed concept would be of little practical use in contemporary adjustments to the drainage infrastructure.

In a March 1948 letter to the minister of Public Works, Lyons identified factors that contributed to his change of heart. He began by acknowledging the intrinsic appeal of apportioning drainage costs on a watershed basis and noted that the first drainage investigation under J. G. Sullivan proposed something along these lines. Whereas Sullivan had seemed genuinely surprised by the debate over the watershed that emerged at the legislative hearings following the release of his report, Lyons recognized the contentious conceptual realm in which he operated.⁶⁴ It is not clear whether his own faith in watershed management was shaken, but evidently he came to feel a broad consensus on this approach was simply out of reach. Highlanders held to the notion of agricultural progress on privately owned quarter sections confirmed through the Dominion Lands Act. Having found themselves vulnerable to the downstream effects of upstream land changes, lowlanders felt it was appropriate to spread the cost of drainage across the watershed. Neither highlanders nor lowlanders were open to compromise. Ultimately, it was continued contention over the idea of watershed management, rather than any weakness in the concept itself, that was the key factor in Lyons's decision not to recommend that the provincial government restructure the drainage system along watershed lines.

Lyons built on the Finlayson Commission's proposal that the province should assume a substantial proportion of drainage costs. In the context of a broad, underlying shift in expectations of government underway in the middle decades of the twentieth century, the sort of general consensus lacking over watershed management emerged in relation to state intervention.⁶⁵ Growing public and political willingness to accept substantial investment of provincial money in public projects underpinned Lyons's recommendations. In 1895, provincial legislation had established an administrative structure for large-scale drainage in Manitoba; decades later, enhanced provincial funding served to mitigate the conflict that had ensued. From analysis of these two signal events as well as the smaller adjustments in the years between them, what emerges is a picture of successive provincial governments trying to adapt to complex and dynamic human and physical landscapes.⁶⁶

Lyons proposed that the funding arrangement for any drain should turn on the type of water it was to carry: Drains carrying only foreign water would be financed entirely by the province; drains carrying both foreign and local water would be two thirds paid by the province; and drains carrying only local water would be one third paid by the province.⁶⁷ He believed that "dealing with the 'foreign water' problem separately from 'local water'" would allow for "a more rational basis of allocating the costs" of drainage.⁶⁸ However, distinguishing foreign water from local water within a drain was no simpler than measuring the downstream consequences of upstream land use changes. Lyons's pragmatic solution involved the use of double dyke drains. A double dyke drain consisted of two ditches excavated at some distance from each other. The material taken out of each drain was deposited on the bank furthest from the other drain, creating levies that enclosed the two ditches as well as the expanse of land between them.⁶⁹ In years of regular flow, water would be confined to the two drains. During freshet, the levies served to contain early spring flow, which often occurred before the ice had cleared from the drains. In times of extreme flood or heavy freshet, the levies provided an additional measure of protection for the surrounding area, as water could flow over the land between the drains.

Figure 1. Double Dyke Drain

Adapted by Eric Leinberger from John Warkentin, "Water and Adaptive Strategies in Settling the Canadian West," Manitoba Historical Society Transactions 3 (1971–72): 72.

The double dyke was not a new idea in the 1940s. The Sullivan Commission had suggested in the early 1920s that double dykes might be useful in areas suffering from particularly severe spring flooding. However, Lyons proposed using them not only to cope with extreme flow, but also to maintain a physical separation between highland and lowland water. Having accepted that it was likely impossible to achieve consensus on watershed management, he began advocating that the best solution was to attempt to sever the major links between the upper and lower watershed. Smaller channels in the highlands would funnel surface flow toward the double dyke drains, which would then speed the water through the lowlands to safe outlets in natural rivers or streams. The levies along the outer banks of double dyke drains that prevented unusually large flows from spilling over onto the lowlands would also keep the drains from collecting any lowland water. The result would be largely separate systems for the management of highland and lowland water. While the idea of enhanced provincial funding originated with the Finlayson Commission, it was M. A. Lyons who proposed spending the money to reshape drainage patterns in order to eliminate highlander-lowlander conflict.

The use of double dyke drains proposed by Lyons represented an approach to drainage that was entirely different from that advocated by the Sullivan Commission. As the government would pay for double dyke drains, those in the upper watershed would have no financial responsibility for drainage, regardless of whether their actions increased runoff rates. The drainage maintenance district would become financially viable as drainage levies would be much reduced when they were not inflated by the costs of draining foreign water. Rather than echoing Elliot and Sullivan by recommending that the drainage district should be expanded to approximate the watershed, Lyons proposed that the watershed be remade to accommodate the drainage district. Molyneux St. John recommended in 1871 that the settlement system should accommodate the surface water patterns of the wet prairie. By the late 1940s Lyons felt the most viable solution to persistent lowlander flooding was to do the reverse: to alter environmental conditions to reflect settlement patterns.

Historian of science Thomas Hughes has proposed the concept of technological momentum to help explain how choices made in the past constrain the options available in the future.⁷⁰ The momentum that drove drainage in Manitoba issued in large part from the federal government's 1872 Dominion Lands Act. The province missed an early opportunity to introduce watershed management when it passed drainage legislation that did not incorporate the watershed idea in 1895. While lowlanders who found themselves flooded by foreign water came to favor watershed management, highlanders remained committed to a more rigid conception of the principles of private property and agricultural progress derived in part from the Dominion Lands Act. Controversy over the watershed idea raged among experts because of the difficulty of detecting and measuring ecological connections and among Manitobans because of legislation and ideological principles that framed relations to their land. Across North America, the expenditure of state money on public projects became increasingly acceptable after the mid-1930s. In this context, the funding of drainage by the province at large acquired a general legitimacy that watershed-based funding never possessed. Lyons's report confirmed that the watershed idea would not easily be reconciled to the human landscapes of the region.

CONCLUSION

BEFORE THE LEGISLATIVE COMMITTEE on Drainage in the early 1920s, J. G. Sullivan claimed that drainage was "one of the most complicated and difficult problems in the country or in the world since the beginning of time."⁷¹ Lyons's recommendations would not resolve it. Not surprisingly, attempting to sever highland and lowland drainage proved no easier than trying to divide the wet prairie into quarter-sections to be independently farmed. In both cases, the ecological commons of surface water persisted despite human efforts to curtail it. Nevertheless, ending analysis with the Lyons report is appropriate because, by the time of its mid-twentieth century release, it was possible to appreciate the extent to which the momentum of the Dominion Lands Act, on the one hand, and communities of interest derived from local topography, on the other, shaped how the drainage question was perceived and addressed in Manitoba.

Given the importance of federal legislation in defining Manitoba settlement, it is striking that, in accord with the division of powers established in the 1867 British North America Act, the province was left to undertake the drainage necessary to reconcile the quarter-section and the watershed within the topographically challenging landscape of Manitoba's soup bowl. This did not go unnoticed. Indeed, in a 1948 letter to the Minister of Public Works, M. A. Lyons explained how the land settlement policy of the Canadian government had left "the provincial government holding the bag."⁷² Leaving aside the question of federal/provincial jurisdiction, a fraught question in Canadian political history, what remains is a telling example of the long-term complications of early settlement patterns. The province assumed a larger role in drainage financing in order to mitigate the conflict created in part by how the federal government's settlement system ignored what Molyneux St. John called "the nature of the country." In choosing to fund the double dyke drains that were intended to reshape the watershed, the province confirmed that the settlement system would trump environmental conditions. Significantly, this decision came about largely due to enduring public controversy over drainage funding. While drainage took place in the context of both a settlement system and a jurisdictional structure established by the federal government, public discourse (and the provincial government response to it) was as important as national authority in shaping the ongoing evolution of Manitoba's drained landscape.

In a well-received recent book (and a corresponding article in Environmental History), David E. Nye identifies grid-based land administration as a key aspect of the "narratives of new beginnings" he sees as fundamental to American resettlement.⁷³ He provides a compelling description of how the assumptions that underpinned the 1862 Homestead Act—that land could be successfully cultivated within a grid structure, that private property was preferable to public administration—were basic to the foundational myths of the United States. Nye's ambitious study helps explain the resettlement of what is now the United States, even as it prompts Canadian historians to reflect on how Canada's foundational myths may have differed, at least in inflection.

But national differences are not the only ones that deserve careful consideration. In addressing the United States at large, Nye's analysis operates at a scale comparable to that which underpinned state-sponsored survey projects. In connecting this macro-scale to a finer-grained analysis attuned to the geography of particular places, it is possible to appreciate the significance of local variations in broadly similar processes of North American resettlement and environmental transformation. The emergence of the terms "highlander" and "lowlander" in what is often understood as a relatively flat prairie province suggests that Manitoba provides a compelling example of the importance of the local context for resettlement. The significance of local conditions is further emphasized by how, even as the environmental factors prompting debate were confined in large measure to the south-central portion of the province, the terms of dispute were certainly not provincial. Conditions in Manitoba's wet prairie catalyzed debate over the basic legislative and ideological principles governing landholding across the prairie region. While water flow between the highlands and the lowlands remained controversial, the matter of drainage provided a link between the seemingly disparate scales of broad ideological principles and local environmental conditions. At least in Manitoba's wet prairie, these flowed together.

Shannon Stunden Bower is the Grant Notley Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of History and Classics at the University of Alberta. She is completing a book manuscript on the relation between land drainage and state development in Manitoba, Canada. She is also researching the Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Administration, a Canadian mid-twentieth century agricultural agency.

NOTES

For valuable assistance in the preparation of this article, I would like to thank the editors and anonymous reviewers for Environmental History. I would also like to thank the members of my doctoral committee for help with the larger project from which this piece derives. Additionally, cartographer Eric Leinberger was patient and helpful, and Josh MacFayden provided useful feedback on an early draft. Any errors of fact or interpretation remain my responsibility.

^1. Archives of Manitoba (hereafter AM), MG 12 A1, Adams Archibald Fonds, Item 164 A. St. John's thinking seems to have paralleled that of John Wesley Powell, the American Civil War veteran and federal civil servant well known among environmental historians for his advocacy of watershed-based land administration. Among the many books and articles that address Powell, Donald Worster's recent biography is especially noteworthy. Donald Worster, A River Running West: The Life of John Wesley Powell (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).

^2. Leslie Hewes, "The Northern Wet Prairie of the United States: Nature, Sources of Information, and Extent," Annals of the Association of American Geographers 41 (December 1951): 307.

^3. For a careful discussion of the wet prairie, see Hugh Prince, Wetlands of the American Midwest: A Historical Geography of Changing Attitudes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 29–31. Prince notes that the category wet prairie was adopted by the United States Soil Survey, but has been omitted from the American government's wetland classification system. Though the scale of her remarkable study is likely also a factor, this omission may help explain why the wet prairie is not considered more extensively in Ann Vileisis's recent environmental history of United States wetlands. Ann Vileisis, Discovering the Unknown Landscape: A History of American Wetlands (Washington, DC: Island Press, 1997).

^4. Donald Pisani has recently argued for greater attention to the history of water east of the hundredth meridian, which splits the drier West from the more humid East. "Beyond the Hundredth Median: Nationalizing the History of Water in the United States," Environmental History 5 (October 2000): 466–82.

^5. John Opie, The Law of the Land: Two Hundred Years of American Farmland Policy (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987), 60. For a discussion of the Dominion Lands Act and subsequent amendments, see Kirk N. Lambrecht, The Administration of Dominion Lands, 1870–1930 (Winnipeg: Hignell Printing, 1991).

^6. Useful comparisons of the Canadian and American experience include Donald Worster, "Two Faces West: The Development Myth in Canada and the United States," in Terra Pacifica: People and Place in the Northwest States and Western Canada, ed. Paul W. Hirt (Pullman: Washington State University Press, 1998), 71–91; Paul W. Gates (with Lillian F. Gates), "Canadian and American Land Policy Decisions, 1930," in The Jeffersonian Dream: Studies in the History of American Land Policy and Development, ed. Allan G. and Margaret Beattie Bogue (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996), 148–65.

^7. Denis Cosgrove, "The Measures of America," in James Corner, Taking Measures Across the American Landscape (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 3–4.

^8. John C. Weaver, "Concepts of Economic Improvement and the Social Construction of Property Rights: Highlights from the English-Speaking World," in Despotic Dominion: Property Rights in British Settler Societies, ed. John McLaren, A. R. Buck, and Nancy E. Wright (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2005), 79–102. See, also, John C. Weaver, The Great Land Rush and the Making of the Modern World (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2003), 11–87.

^9. The term "resettlement" derives from the work of historical geographer Cole Harris, and is employed here as a way of marking how the processes considered in this essay took place in the context of Aboriginal dispossession. See Cole Harris, The Resettlement of British Columbia: Essays on Colonialism and Cultural Change (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1997).

^10. Mary R. McCorvie and Christopher L. Lant, "Drainage District Formation and the Loss of Midwestern Wetlands, 1850–1930," Agricultural History 67 (Fall 1993): 29–39; Pisani, "Beyond the Hundredth Median," 476–79.

^11. J. A. Griffiths, "The History and Organization of Surface Drainage in Manitoba," 7.

^12. John Warkentin, "Water and Adaptive Strategies in Settling the Canadian West," Manitoba Historical Society Transactions 3 (1971–72): 59–73.

^13. Edward M. Ledohowski, The Heritage Landscape of the Crow Wing Study Region of Southeastern Manitoba (Manitoba: Historic Resources Branch, Manitoba Culture, Heritage and Tourism, 2003).

^14. G. R. Brooks and E. Nielsen, "Canadian Landform Examples 40: Red River, Red River Valley, Manitoba," The Canadian Geographer 44 (Fall 2000): 306–11.

^15. AM, GR 45, N-11–3–16, Notes on Red River Floods with particular reference to the flood of 1950 by R. H. Clark, October 1950, 14.

^16. AM, GR 1607, G 7987, J. A. Macdonnell to the Minister of Public Works, December 30,1898.

^17. A. S. Morton, History of Prairie Settlement (Toronto: MacMillan Company of Canada, 1938), 102–05.

^18. AM, GR 1530, Order-in-Council # 619, Re Report of the Minister of Public Works on lands reclaimed by drainage, January 14, 1882.

^19. AM, GR 1609, file: Drainage Commission, Report on Land Drainage in the Province of Manitoba by C. G. Elliot, June 5, 1918.

^20. Laurence B. Lee, "The Canadian-American Irrigation Frontier, 1884–1914," Agricultural History 40 (October 1965): 271–83. Historical geographer Matthew Evenden has explained that this legislation is the key factor distinguishing the history of Canadian irrigation from the "uneven patchwork of local traditions, differing state policies and contested applications of federal power" that defined the American experience. Matthew Evenden, "Precarious Foundations: Irrigation, Environment, and Social Change in the Canadian Pacific Railway's Eastern Section, 1900–1930," Journal of Historical Geography 32 (January 2006): 74–95.

^21. The term 'watershed substitute' is inspired by John Opie's description of the Ogallala aquifer as a "climate substitute" for farmers in the midwestern United States in "100 Years of Climate Risk Assessment on the High Plains: Which Farm Paradigm Does Irrigation Serve?" Agricultural History 63 (Spring 1989): 254.

^22. For a suggestive description of how the need for local land drainage related to the formation of the Municipality of Westbourne, see Margaret Morton Fahrni and W. L. Morton, Third Crossing (Winnipeg: Advocate Printers, 1946).

^23. Canada. Census of 1921. Table 27: Population classified according to principal origins of the people by counties and their subdivisions.

^24. For discussion of the Mennonites in Manitoba with some attention to drainage, see John Warkentin, The Mennonite Settlements of Southern Manitoba (PhD diss., University of Toronto, 1960).

^25. Ibid., 189.

^26. Mark Fiege, Irrigated Eden: The Making of An Agricultural Landscape in the American West (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999). See, also, Mark Fiege, "Private Property and the Ecological Common in the American West," in Everyday America: Cultural Landscape Studies after J. B. Jackson, ed. Chris Wilson and Paul Groth (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003), 219–31, 343–46.

^27. The use of "highlander" and "lowlander" is also evident in media reports of drainage controversy. For examples, see the Manitoba Free Press, February 16, 1922; and the Winnipeg Tribune, February 8, 15, and 22, 1922.

^28. W. J. Carlyle, "The Management of Environmental Problems on the Manitoba Escarpment," Canadian Geographer 24 (Fall 1980): 255–69.

^29. AM, GR 174, G 8374, file 13: Special Committee on Drainage, Drainage Committee Report; AM, GR 1609, G 8019, file: Drainage—General, Drainage Committee Report. The distinction between foreign water and natural flow can be usefully compared to that between stored water and natural flow as described by Mark Fiege. In both cases, distinctions between types of water that seemed theoretically clear proved difficult to make in any practical way. In Manitoba, as in Fiege's Idaho, the gap between theory and reality contributed to conflict among interested parties. Fiege, Irrigated Eden, 97–112.

^30. AM, Drainage Maintenance Boards Minutes and Office Files, GR 7784, Q 032694, file: Drainage—General, Memorandum Related to Drainage District no. 2, n.d.

^31. AM, GR 1609, G 8019, file: Drainage—General, Drainage Commission Notes by Mr. McColl, n.d.

^32. C. G. Elliot is discussed as a significant figure in the planning and administration of American drainage projects in Christopher F. Meindl, Derek H. Alderman, and Peter Waylen, "On the Importance of Environmental Claims-Making: The Role of James O. Wright in Promoting the Drainage of Florida's Everglades in the Early Twentieth Century," Annals of the Association of American Geographers 92 (December 2002): 682–701.

^33. AM, GR 1609, G 8019, file: Drainage Commission, Report on Land Drainage in the Province of Manitoba by C. G. Elliot, June 5, 1918. See, also, AM, GR 7784, Q 032694, file: General, Text of an Address delivered at annual meeting of Union of Municipal Drainage Districts by F. E. Umphrey, November 27, 1945.

^34. AM, GR 1609, G 8019, file: Drainage Commission, Report on Land Drainage in the Province of Manitoba by C. G. Elliot, June 5, 1918.

^35. AM, GR 1530, Order-in-Council # 30724, Report of a Committee of the Executive Council, January 17, 1919.

^36. Drainage Commission. Report, 11.

^37. Ibid.

^38. Ibid., 20.

^39. The growing influence of technocratic expertise in Manitoba provincial administration is documented in John Kendle, John Bracken: A Political Biography (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979).

^40. Drainage Commission. Report, 20.

^41. The Manitoba Legislative Assembly Unpublished Sessional Papers contain an incomplete transcript of the hearings of the Legislative Committee on Drainage regarding the Sullivan Report. AM, GR 174, G8374, file 13: Special Committee on Drainage, Drainage Committee Report. Another partial transcript is in the files of the Minister of Public Works. AM, GR 1609, G8019, File: Drainage—General, Drainage Committee Report. The Committee sent notice of the hearings to the municipalities and those who testified were identified in the transcripts as representatives of their municipalities.

^42. AM, GR 1609, G 8019, file: Drainage Commission, Drainage Committee Report, 54. Municipal representatives who spoke in favor of the report came from the municipalities of Rhineland, Ste. Rose, Glenella, Roland, Morris, Macdonald, Cartier, and Taché. This list draws on the hearing transcripts as well as newspaper reports published in the Manitoba Free Press, 16 February 16, 1922; and the Winnipeg Tribune, February 8, 15, and 22, 1922.

^43. Gordon B. Dodds, "The Stream-Flow Controversy: A Conservation Turning Point," The Journal of American History 56 (June 1969): 59–69; Luna B. Leopold and Thomas Maddock, Jr., The Flood Control Controversy: Big Dams, Little Dams, and Land Management (New York: The Ronald Press Company, 1954); James L. Westcoat, Jr., "'Watersheds' in Regional Planning," in The American Planning Tradition: Culture and Policy, ed. Robert Fishman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 147–71. See, also, Nancy Langston, Forest Dreams, Forest Nightmares: The Paradox of Old Growth in the Inland West (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1995), 141–48; and Samuel P. Hays, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency: The Progressive Conservation Movement, 1890–1920 (New York: Atheneum, 1969), 203–05.

^44. Through examination of waterfowl management, geographer Robert M. Wilson has explored how conflict ensued from the difficulty of establishing ecological relationships on the one hand and maintaining boundaries in dynamic environments on the other. Robert M. Wilson, "Directing the Flow: Migratory Waterfowl, Scale, and Mobility in Western North America," Environmental History 7 (April 2002): 247–66. The human and ecological consequences of boundary-making are also explored in Nancy Langston, Where Land and Water Meet: A Western Landscape Transformed (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003).

^45. AM, GR 174, G 8373, file 13: Special Committee on Drainage, Drainage Committee Report, 33–44.

^46. AM, GR 1609, G 8019, file: Drainage Commission, Drainage Committee Report, 20, 33, 48, 55. According to the hearing transcripts and media reports, speakers from the municipalities of Stanley, Thompson, Pembina, Lorne, Grey, Dufferin, Victoria, and South Norfolk disagreed with the recommendations of the Sullivan Commission.

^47. The ideological underpinnings of the land rush on the Canadian Prairies can be understood in the context of wider international migration patterns. See Weaver, The Great Land Rush.

^48. AM, GR 174, G 8374, file 13: Special Committee on Drainage, Drainage Committee Report 127.

^49. The 1921 census suggests that the lowlands were in fact more agriculturally productive than the highlands, despite drainage problems. Canada. Census of 1921. Table 79: Farms and Farm Property.

^50. AM, GR 1609, G 8019, file: Drainage Commission, Drainage Committee Report, 33.

^51. AM, GR 174, G 8374, file 13, Special Committee on Drainage, Drainage Committee Report 90, 121. Economic historian W. T. Easterbrook has considered government-sponsored drainage in the context of various state credit programs in support of farmers. W. T. Easterbrook, Farm Credit in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1938), 96.

^52. Mark Fiege makes a similar point in describing the resolution of conflict over the management of stored water along Idaho's Snake River. Fiege, Irrigated Eden, 110–12.

^53. John Kendle, John Bracken: A Political Biography (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979), 37–51.

^54. Thomas Peterson, "Ethnic and Class Politics," in Canadian Provincial Politics: The Party Systems of the Ten Provinces, ed. Martin Robin (Scarborough, ON: Prentice-Hall of Canada, 1978), 77–80.

^55. J. H. Ellis, "The Soils of Manitoba" (Winnipeg: Economic Survey Board #14, 1938), 31. See, also, Leslie Hewes and Phillip E. Frandson, "Occupying the Wet Prairie: The Role of Artificial Drainage in Story County, Iowa," Annals of the Association of American Geographers 42 (March 1952), 40.

^56. AM, GR 1609, G 8019, letter (unsigned and unaddressed), February 9, 1924. Weeds were particularly problematic in the drained landscape, with inadequately maintained ditches acting as vectors of dispersal within the ecological commons created by unwanted plants. For a discussion of the weed commons, see Mark Fiege, "The Weedy West: Mobile Nature, Boundaries, and Common Space in the Montana Landscape," The Western Historical Quarterly 35 (2005): 22–47. On the spread of weeds on the Canadian Prairies more generally, see Clinton L. Evans, The War on Weeds in the Prairie West: An Environmental History (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2002).

^57. AM, GR 1617, G 5324, G. B. McColl, "Drainage in the Red River Valley in Manitoba," The Canadian Engineer, September 8, 1917.

^58. Manitoba. Land Drainage Arrangement Commission. Report of the Land Drainage Arrangement Commission respecting municipalities containing land subject to review under "the Land Drainage Act" (Manitoba, King's Printer, 1936), 16.

^59. AM, GR 589, Order-in-Council #602/35 B-14–8–10, May 23, 1935.

^60. AM, GR 1617, G 5324, Survey of Foreign Water in Manitoba by H. H. McIntyre, September 1946.

^61. AM, GR 1609, G 8048, file: Levies. Memorandum for W. R. Clubb Re Recommendations to Council Respecting Drainage Settlement, n.d.

^62. AM, GR 589, Order-in-Council # 50/47, B-15–7–6, January 14, 1947. Lyons's appointment was made retroactive to September 1, 1947.

^63. AM, G 1609, G 8046, file: Special Drainage Survey Conducted by M. A. Lyons, Outline of Work Required in Connection with Investigation of Drainage Districts by M. A. Lyons, n.d. See, also, in this file: The Lyons Report and Recommendations Re "Foreign Water" and Maintenance Problems, n.d., as well as the letter from M. A. Lyons to E. F. Willis, September 9, 1947.

^64. AM, G 1609, G8046, file: Special Drainage Survey Conducted by M. A. Lyons, M. A. Lyons to E. F. Willis, Minister of Public Works, 31 March 1948. See also M. A. Lyons, Report and Recommendations on "Foreign Water" and Maintenance Problems in Drainage Maintenance Districts Constituted under the Land Drainage Arrangement Act, 1935, Province of Manitoba (Winnipeg: King's Printer, 1950), 16.

^65. A. A. Den Otter, "Irrigation and Flood Control," in Building Canada: A History of Public Works, ed. Norman R. Ball (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988), 158.

^66. This interpretation can be contrasted with those offered by noted scholars such as Donald Worster and James C. Scott, both of whom have authored works that emphasize how government authority has contributed to environmental maladjustment. In this way, the story of drainage in southern Manitoba might serve to enrich understanding of the government role in human-environmental relationships. Donald Worster, Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985); James Scott, Seeing Like A State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).

^67. Lyons, Report, 23–24.

^68. AM, GR 1609, G 8046, file: Special Drainage Survey Conducted by MA Lyons. M. A. Lyons to E. F. Willis, March 31, 1948.

^69. Warkentin, "Water and Adaptive Strategies in Settling the Canadian West," 72.

^70. Thomas P. Hughes, "Technological Momentum," in Does Technology Drive History? The Dilemma of Technological Determinism, ed. Merrit Roe Smith and Leo Marx (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994), 101–13.

^71. AM, GR 1609, G 8019, file: Drainage—General, Drainage Committee Report, 161.

^72. AM, GR 1609, G 8046, file: Special Drainage Survey Conducted by M. A. Lyons, Lyons to Errick F. Willis, Minister of Public Works, May 6, 1948.

^73. David E. Nye, America as Second Creation: Technology and Narratives of New Beginnings (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003). See, also, David E. Nye, "Technology, Nature, and American Origin Stories," Environmental History 8 (January 2003): 8–24.

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watersheds: conceptualizingMANITOBA'SDRAINED LANDSCAPE, 1895–1950